DexCare, Inc., a newly formed digital health company, has announced a $20 million investment led by Define Ventures, and also including Frist Cressey Ventures, Kaiser Permanente Ventures, SpringRock Ventures and Providence Ventures.
DexCare, a platform-as-a-service (PaaS), is a digital care operating system that manages health system capacity and demand across all lines of care. It has secured half a dozen customers, including Community Health Network, the Froedtert and the Medical College of Wisconsin health network, Houston Methodist, and Providence. Concurrent with funding, DexCare has been spun out as a separate company after being incubated at the Washington-based Providence, within the health system’s Digital Innovation Group.
DexCare was developed by Providence, one of the largest health systems in the U.S. Initially developed as the platform for Providence's ambulatory care business, DexCare has been driving patient acquisition, navigation and capacity optimization for the organization since 2016, according to officials.
They added that DexCare enables health systems to “evolve their traditional, one-to-one, patient-to-provider relationships into a highly scalable digital experience for their patients, thus increasing revenue from new, digital-first patients while minimizing new patient acquisition costs. DexCare has delivered to Providence a new stream of digitally-enabled patients, of which 30 percent are new to the system and 73 percent are commercially insured,” officials stated.
In a recent interview with Healthcare Innovation Senior Editor David Raths, Aaron Martin, executive vice president and chief digital and innovation officer at Providence, called DexCare “an e-commerce platform for healthcare.”
Rod Hochman, M.D., president and CEO, Providence, noted that "DexCare was instrumental as we transformed our ambulatory care model to better meet the needs of patients over the past few years. In 2020, scalability of the DexCare platform was instrumental in our response to COVID. "We're proud that this internally developed and incubated technology is now ready to be made available to other health systems—furthering the Providence vision of health for a better world."
DexCare will be run by health technology veterans Derek Streat and Sean O'Connor, who have been working inside Providence as entrepreneurs-in-residence for close to a year. Lynne Chou O'Keefe, founder and managing partner of Define Ventures and Martin himself will join Streat on DexCare's board of directors.
DexCare is the third technology incubated by the Providence Digital Innovation Group. The first was Xealth, which enables clinicians to prescribe and monitor digital health content, apps and services as easily as they do medications or orders today. Xealth was spun out of Providence in 2017. The second was Circle, a women's health technology company, that was sold to Wildflower Health in 2018.
"DexCare has been a great example of how Providence's Digital Innovation Group has been 'disrupting from the inside', and we're excited to be able to share what we've developed with the industry,’ said Martin.
“Virtual care has always been a key strategy to ensure we are delivering the best care to our patients," added Sarah Pletcher, M.D., vice president and executive medical director of Virtual Care at Houston Methodist. "Like many hospital systems, COVID triggered an increased demand for virtual care offerings, but not every health system can offer the service and coordination and orchestration of primary and specialty care the way that we do. So, for us, our virtual infrastructure had to facilitate that richness. DexCare offers us a "wrapper" that pulls patients and consumers into our environment with ease."
